Naked Quakers

Posted on July 18, 2004 in Morals & Ethics

Shari — a quintessential told us the story behind the banning of Pacific Yearly Meeting Quakers from holding their conferences at Mount Saint Mary’s College some eighteen years ago. In the middle of the night, a group of Friends went skinny-dipping in the college’s pool. “It wasn’t just a group of teenagers,” she laughed, “but their parents, too. And members of Ministry and Oversight.” In other words, a solid cross-section of wet-skinned, naked Friends enjoyed the comforts of the water.

“If it had just been a group of teenagers,” said Shari, “they probably would have overlooked it. But the fact that it included leading adults meant that they had to ban us.”

Shari found the whole episode amusing more than shocking. I have to concur, laughing even harder when I think of the deeper ironies involved. The Catholic Church — which has spent most of my lifetime diligently covering up the sexual escapades of its repressed priesthood and which includes among its treasures the Vatican Museum, a bacchanalia of nude (mostly male) art — lost it yet again over the simple, nonsexual display of the human body? Give me a break!

The whole incident goes deeper than that, illustrating the true break between “family values” Christians on the Right and members of the Left. On the one hand we have concealment. On the other we have openness. What is so terrible about the human body that it must be covered up? (Well, mine should be covered up.) We have seen how the Catholic Church keeps paying the price of the Jero-Augustian Heresy in a maddened clergy and violated lives. The question comes down to this: is it healthier to ponderously sexualize the body as the Right does or to allow for it to have nonsexual as well as sexual overtones? The Left isn’t promiscuous: many Leftists I know dislike pornography as much they eschew repressiveness. It’s all about lies when it comes down to it, a lie about what are the healthy ways to live with one another. Burying the body only creates vampires, the kind who secretly read pornography, the kind who molest children and preach encyclicals against our being fully human.